4 Summary of Week 5

This week has shown how speech and language therapists work with children who experience a whole range of language disorders or delays in acquisition. In some geographical areas, such as the one in which Sean Pert works, many of these children will happen to be multilingual.

Bilingual children are in the privileged position of being able to distinguish between the function of what they want to say (which may be largely independent of the language they choose to speak at any given moment) and the linguistic form that this normally takes in any one language. In order to diagnose and support children appropriately, it is clearly an advantage if professionals have some insight, as Sean Pert does, into the different structures of the languages spoken by the children they are working with. As Sean points out, children with two or more languages will soon ‘catch up’ with monolingual children’s development and will then have the great advantage of being able to communicated in multiple languages.

If you’d like to follow up on the BEST project, you could explore their site here: Building Early Sentences Therapy and also the LIVELY research project that gave rise to BEST: Language Intervention in the Early Years. And if you’re a parent, carer or work with young children – or if you’re interested in perhaps becoming a speech and language therapist, you may be interested in the resources page here: Useful Links.

In Week 6 you’ll learn about the kind of language a mediator might use and why.

You can now go to Week 6, the final week of the course.